Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned NATO and the EU at the UN General Assembly that any aggression against Russia would be met with a ‘decisive response’. While asserting that Moscow has no intention of attacking the West, he emphasised that Russia is prepared to respond if provoked.
Published On 28 Sep 202528 Sep 2025
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Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov has warned NATO and the European Union that “any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response”.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Saturday, Lavrov insisted that Moscow had no plans to attack the West, but that it was prepared to act if provoked.
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His comments came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blamed Russia for recent drone and plane incursions in Europe.
“Russia is testing their ability to defend themselves and trying to influence societies so people begin to ask: ‘If we can’t protect ourselves, why should we keep supporting Ukraine?’. This is intended to reduce assistance to Ukraine, especially ahead of winter,” he wrote on X.
Moscow continues to deny violating Polish airspace with drones, and Estonian airspace with fighter jets, this month. It also says it played no role in the rogue drones spotted near airports in Denmark this week, which forced several airports to shut temporarily.
In his UN speech, Lavrov hit out at accusations from the West, blaming it for scaremongering about the possibility of a “third world war”.
“Russia is being accused of almost planning to attack NATO and EU countries. President [Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly debunked these provocations,” he said.
But Lavrov also insisted that his country still had “some hopes” for ceasefire talks with the United States over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, just days after US President Donald Trump appeared to align himself more closely with Kyiv by saying it could recapture all of the Ukrainian territory seized by Russia.
Trump’s comments, which were made after he met Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the UNGA, marked a significant change in tone. Previously, the US president had said that Kyiv needed to make concessions, arguing that it would never reclaim occupied territory seized by Russia since 2014.
Despite Trump’s statement on Tuesday, Lavrov still expressed a belief in the role of the US as a potential mediator.
“We have some hopes for the continuation of the Russian-American dialogue, especially after the summit in Alaska,” he told delegates at the UN headquarters on Saturday.
The Russian foreign minister suggested that the Trump administration wanted to “realistically resolve the Ukrainian crisis”.
“Russia and the US bear a special responsibility for the state of affairs in the world and for avoiding risks that could plunge humanity into a new war,” he added.
Lavrov’s appearance at the UN followed claims by Russia on Saturday that it had captured three more villages in eastern Ukraine.
The Russian army said in a statement that it had taken the villages of Derylove and Maiske in the Donetsk region, and the settlement of Stepove in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Meanwhile, Ukraine said it had launched a successful drone attack against an oil pumping facility in Russia’s Chuvashia region.
“The SBU [Ukrainian security service] continues to impose sanctions on the Russian oil sector, which brings the aggressor country excess profits that go to the war against Ukraine,” a Ukrainian official told Reuters.
An overnight Russian barrage killed one person and wounded 12 in Ukraine’s southeastern Kherson region, and damaged railways in the neighbouring Odesa region, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
As Kyiv attempts to improve its air defences to stop Russian missile and drone attacks, Zelenskyy said on Saturday that a Ukrainian delegation would head to the US for weapons talks in late September or early October.
Ukraine’s president added that his country had received a US-made Patriot air defence system from Israel a month ago, with two more expected to arrive later this year.
On Saturday, both Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for a four-day blackout at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Although outages are common, it is the longest so far in the war.
The plant’s six reactors have been off since Moscow seized it shortly after its full-scale invasion in February 2022. However, the facility still needs power to keep its cooling and safety systems operating to prevent its reactors from melting.
NATO Chief Mark Rutte also said Europe would increase defence spending in a ‘BIG way’ thanks to US pressure.
United States President Donald Trump has shared a series of texts from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte praising his attacks on Iran and the pressure he placed on allies to increase their military spending.
Trump shared Rutte’s texts in a screenshot posted to his social media website, Truth Social, on Tuesday, as he travels to a NATO summit in the Netherlands.
“Mr President, dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer,” the message reads.
Afterwards, Rutte defended Trump’s decision to share what appeared to be private messages. The NATO chief added that his tone in the messages – which some said seemed to mimic Trump’s own style of writing – was “appropriate”.
The messages highlight European efforts to form a productive relationship with Trump, who has frequently said the continent must spend more on its military capabilities. He has also questioned the value of the US’s economic and security partnerships with NATO allies in Europe and Canada.
The texts also underscore the widespread praise Trump has received from European leaders for his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, even though those strikes are considered by many to be illegal under international law.
In his messages, Rutte commends Trump for pushing European nations to increase their military spending, stating that NATO members have agreed to boost such spending to 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP).
“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” said Rutte, adding that Trump had achieved what “NO American president in decades could get done”.
Trump had been pushing for increases to NATO defence spending since his first term, from 2017 to 2021. He has long accused NATO allies of taking advantage of the US by relying on its military might.
Previously, NATO members had agreed to a spending goal that represented 2 percent of their GDP. Trump had pushed for that to be raised to 5 percent, with 3.5 percent of that sum dedicated to “hard defence” investments like weaponry.
Some countries, however, including Spain, have pushed back against the calls to increase military spending, calling the demand “unreasonable”.
“There’s a problem with Spain. Spain is not agreeing, which is very unfair to the rest of them, frankly,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on his way to the two-day meeting.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to send mixed signals about his commitment to NATO, a mutual defence alliance created during the Cold War. It has been a cornerstone of US and European cooperation ever since.
Trump has long signalled ambivalence towards Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document. That article includes a mutual defence clause that requires NATO members to consider an attack on one country to be an attack on the group as a whole.
When pressed about his commitment to Article 5 on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that there could be “numerous definitions” of the clause. Rutte, asked about the comment, said he had “no doubt” that the US was committed to mutual defence.
Criticisms of NATO are not new or unique to Trump. Sceptics have pointed out that the threat it was created to balance against, the USSR, had long ceased to exist. Proponents, meanwhile, have argued the alliance serves as an important bulwark against modern-day military aggression.
But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 breathed new life into the organisation, expanding its ranks with the addition of countries like Finland and Sweden and prompting increased calls for greater defence spending.
WASHINGTON — President Trump, with his decision to order U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, is gambling that direct U.S. involvement can deliver a decisive blow to a weakened Tehran while managing to avoid bringing the U.S. into an expansive regional conflict.
Trump announced the strikes on three Iranian enrichment facilities — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — and said that a “full payload of BOMBS was dropped” on Fordo.
“All planes are safely on their way home,” Trump added in his post. “Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”
It remained to be seen whether the attacks mark the totality of direct American involvement in strikes against Iran or the opening salvo of a larger campaign.
Trump, who said he would address the nation about the strikes at 10 p.m. Eastern time, called it a “very successful military operation.” The president also celebrated the strikes in a call with the news site Axios in which he said, “We had great success tonight” and that “Israel is much safer now.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday had said that Trump would decide whether to move forward with U.S. strikes on Iran within two weeks.
But on Saturday afternoon, commercial flight trackers identified multiple U.S. aerial refueling tankers on a path suggesting that they were accompanying aircraft from the Midwest to the Pacific, raising speculation that something could be afoot.
Still, the flight pattern left many in Washington speculating that an attack might happen soon but would not happen immediately because of the time it would take for the aircraft to make it to the region. But that aircraft may have been a decoy — it was not part of the mission that was carried out early Sunday morning in Iran.
Trump returned from his New Jersey golf club just after 6 p.m. and was to head to a previously scheduled meeting with his national security team. Less than two hours later, the president announced the strikes had been completed.
The decision to directly involve the U.S. comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran that have moved to systematically eradicate the country’s air defenses and offensive missile capabilities, while damaging its nuclear enrichment facilities.
The strikes are a perilous decision for the U.S., as Iran has pledged to retaliate if it joined the Israeli assault. The stakes are also high for Trump personally — he won the White House on the promise of keeping America out of costly foreign conflicts and scoffed at the value of American interventionism.
U.S. and Israeli officials have said that American stealth bombers and 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs offered the best chance of destroying heavily fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program buried deep underground, including at Fordo.
It was not immediately clear whether the U.S. bombers did in fact drop the bunker busters on the Iranian facilities.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the United States in advance that strikes targeting the Islamic Republic would “result in irreparable damage for them.” And Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei declared “any American intervention would be a recipe for an all-out war in the region.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the damage inflicted by the bombings.
Trump has vowed that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and said he had initially hoped that the threat of force would motivate the country’s leaders to give up their nuclear program peacefully.
But Trump appears to have made the calculation — at the prodding of Israeli officials and many Republican lawmakers — that Israel’s operation had softened the ground and presented a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to set back Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps permanently.
The Israelis have said their offensive has already crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing them to already significantly degrade multiple Iranian nuclear sites.
But to destroy the Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, Israel had appealed to Trump for the U.S. bunker-busting bombs, the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which uses its immense weight and sheer kinetic force to reach deeply buried targets and then explode. The penetrator is currently delivered only by the B-2 stealth bomber, which is found only in the American arsenal.
The bomb carries a conventional warhead and is believed to be able to penetrate about 200 feet below the surface before exploding, and the bombs can be dropped one after another, effectively drilling deeper and deeper with each successive blast.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is producing highly enriched uranium at Fordo, raising the possibility that nuclear material could be released into the area if the GBU-57 A/B were used to hit the facility.
Trump’s decision for direct U.S. military intervention comes after his administration made an unsuccessful two-month push — including with high-level, direct negotiations with the Iranians — aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear program.
For months, Trump said he was dedicated to a diplomatic push to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. And he twice — in April and again in late May — persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on military action against Iran and give diplomacy more time.
The U.S. in recent days has been shifting military aircraft and warships into and around the Middle East to protect Israel and U.S. bases from Iranian attacks.
All the while, Trump has gone from publicly expressing hope that the moment could be a “second chance” for Iran to make a deal to delivering explicit threats on Khamenei and making calls for Tehran’s unconditional surrender.
“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump said in a social media posting. “He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
The military showdown with Iran comes seven years after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Obama administration-brokered agreement in 2018, calling it the “worst deal ever.”
The 2015 deal, signed by Iran, the U.S. and other world powers, created a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Trump decried the Obama-era deal for giving Iran too much in return for too little, because the agreement did not cover Iran’s non-nuclear malign behavior.
Trump has bristled at criticism from some of his MAGA faithful, including conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who have suggested that further U.S. involvement would be a betrayal to supporters who were drawn to his promise to end U.S. involvement in expensive and endless wars.
The action by Trump immediately raised some concerns among U.S. lawmakers that the president had exceeded his authority.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) quickly posted on the social media site X: “This is not Constitutional.” California Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said on social media that Trump hit Iran without congressional authorization and that lawmakers should pass a resolution he’s sponsoring with Massie “to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war.”
Vice President JD Vance in a lengthy posting on X earlier this week defended his boss, while acknowledging that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.”
“But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue,” Vance wrote. He added, “I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals.”
Madhani and Boak write for the Associated Press. Madhani reported from Morristown, N.J.
FLORIAN WIRTZ reportedly chose Liverpool over Bayern Munich after being given an irresistible promise by Arne Slot.
The highly-rated German star was courted by both clubs but in the end the guarantee of the No10 role tipped the scales in the Reds’ favour.
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According to Caughtoffside, Wirtz revealed that the decision was ultimately made after Slot assured him he would be THE playmaker in his Liverpool team.
While Bayern offered him the prospect of competing in their world-class side, the path to regular first-team football was far from clear.
Jamal Musiala’s rapid rise at the Allianz Arena and the presence of more established players such as Joshua Kimmich meant that Wirtz would have had to fight for his place in the midfield.
But at Liverpool, it is a different story – he would be the main man at Anfield.
The creative hub of the team, controlling the game from midfield and leading Liverpool’s attack.
Slot promised Wirtz full control of the No10 role, a position that would be his alone.
This clear-cut offer of a starring role was a far cry from the uncertainty Bayern offered.
In the end Wirtz made his choice opting for the chance to be Liverpool’s attacking leader.
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The fact that Liverpool have won the Premier League in Slot’s first season is also contributing factor as it has highlighted the manager’s ability to bring the best out of young players.
The Dutch manager has been able to get the best out of both old and new faces with Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk enjoying stellar campaign as well as Curtis Jones and Cody Gakpo
The Premier League champions have submitted a second improved bid for the Germany midfielder.
Liverpool’s latest offer for the 22-year-old is about £109m, including add-ons.
Wirtz is a key target for the Merseyside club and has made his wishes clear about wanting to join Liverpool before next season.
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